1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an advertisement-section detecting apparatus and an advertisement-section detecting program which detect peripheral sections on the basis of broadcast-data corresponding to a broadcasting program including main sections and the peripheral sections.
2. Description of the Related Art
There have heretofore been known techniques to broadcast broadcast-data corresponding to a broadcasting program including main sections and peripheral sections. The main sections include: main-content sections in which the main content of the broadcasting program is broadcast; and an opening-theme section in which the opening theme, such as the theme music and the cast lineup of the broadcasting program, is broadcast. The peripheral sections include advertisement sections in which commercial messages of the sponsors for the broadcasting program and other advertisements are broadcast.
In addition, in recent years, because of such circumstances as the start of the digital broadcasting service, an increasing number of pieces of broadcast-data have included not only audio data and video data but also caption data.
Under these circumstances, there is a need for a technique to detect the peripheral sections and thus to separate the main sections from the peripheral sections. In response to this need, there is proposed a technique in which the caption data included in the broadcast-data are used for detecting the peripheral sections (see, for example, Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2006-270299).
Specifically, this technique uses the caption data included in the broadcast-data in order to detect the sections that include captions (hereafter, referred to as “captioned sections”) and the sections that do not include captions (hereafter, referred to as “non-captioned sections”). Then, the length of each non-captioned section is compared with the lengths of the peripheral sections in order to detect the non-captioned sections corresponding to advertisement sections.
The above-described technique is no more than a simple comparison of the length of each non-captioned section with the lengths of the peripheral sections. Accordingly, if a main section includes a non-captioned section that is approximately as long as the peripheral sections, the section corresponding to the non-captioned section in the main section is detected as a peripheral section. For example, it is a common practice that the opening-theme section does not include captions, so that the opening-theme section is possibly detected as a peripheral section. Accordingly, the peripheral sections are detected with insufficient accuracy.